Oct 25, 2009

Paper faces on parade: Masquerade

Haha. It is still 85 degrees in the day here in sunny Orlando. Sucks to be cold!

BBC has caught me up again. I finished listening to And Another Thing... as read by BBC 4 and stumbled around their site to listen to a very nice half hour show called The Grand Masquerade about the puzzle-book Masquerade written in 1979. It created a whole craze about it since it was an actual treasure hunt. There are some in America but most of them are about and in Britain. The prize is usually worth every frustrated second of painful mind-bending and illogical puzzle solving. If I had time and effort I'd definitely join this idea. I used to do easy-peasy versions of this as a kid... although I did suck at those. Maybe my mind is a little sharper now. Although reading the answers to them are more convoluted than a well-fleshed conspiracy theory.

So I don't want to brag but one of the roomies was editing a fellow's fiction paper. I lent a hand since she was pretty flustered and all but this thing reads like an ideal version of the cult fiction I read about. There was an idealized character who said everyone was blind except him. He was isolated because he was so "smart" even though it wasn't anything great. He had a philosophy that had to be understood without explanation and the whole thing reeked of Ayn Rand. I commented that and in fact I was spot on. Her writings were a cornerstone in the ideas for the story. I called it straight out. Although he didn't have black emo-hair. Still, I got the big one.

On the book front I have finished another two books: The Messiah of Stockholm and Animal Farm. Neither were the book I had thought to grab at the library last post but oh well. Messiah is an amazing book about man discovering himself as a definition of who he is and not what he might be. It's about losing innocence long after you should have lost it and how ideals can kill you as easily as save you. Definitely worth at least a single read-though. Animal Farm was just about what I expected although I kept applying it to Chinese Maoism as well as to USSR early history. The pictures turned it into a gruesome storybook and made it a bit more horrifying to read. Still working through some of the non-fiction on the 501 books but no luck getting through them yet. They just drag on for so long!